Mahnum Shahzad

Mahnum Shahzad is a PhD student in Health Policy, Economics track, at Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2015 with a double major in economics and mathematics. As an undergraduate, she worked extensively on projects in the fields of development and public economics as a presidential scholar and a research assistant and augmented that experience by doing field work in her native country, Pakistan. After graduation she worked as a research assistant to MIT Professor Heidi Williams at the National Bureau of Economic Research with a focus on innovation in the pharmaceutical sector. Her current research interests focus on provider decision making in the context of pharmaceuticals with a particular focus on accelerated approvals and deadoption decisions. She was an HPI fellow at the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute focused on provider heterogeneity in decisions to deadopt pharmaceutical products in the aftermath of negative information shocks last year. This year she will be a Pyle fellow working on disparities in access to novel therapies for cancer patients under the supervision of Anita Wagner.